Illustrations by Květa Pacovská for Hodina Modrych Slonu by Ota Hofman (Brno: Edice Jiskricky, 1969), on the heels of Adolf Hoffmeister's gorgeous collages.

Květa Pacovská was born in 1928 in Prague, where she still lives and works. She began her career as an illustrator in the fifties, specializing in object books, three-dimensional tactile works and illustrations of children’s stories. A sense of playfulness is an essential characteristic of her work. Her works include bizarre collages, mirrors and superimpositions of different kinds of paper, cut-outs capable of generating ever new characters and stories, as in the miniature theatre of Midnight Play. Her illustrations are immediately recognizable for the use of bold, saturated colors without nuances, a dense style and almost childlike use of lines. Her passion for geometric and abstract shapes is often based on the use of linguistic signs, as in Alphabet in which letters and numbers merge with her creatures. One of her latest works is Unfold/Enfold, an elegant fold-out object book that features unexpected pop-up pages and explosions of colour. [Bologna Book Fair bio]

Blue Elephant Hour didn't make it into English, although quite a few books by Pacovská did. I hope to feature a couple of her mind-melting sixties and seventies Czech-only books in the next month.

See also:

• 2008 round-up of links for Pacovská


• Book by Its Cover on The Little Flower King
  


• Pacovská on google books